The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is resigned to Hamas retaining control over the Gaza Strip for at least a few years, a senior Israeli official told FOX News on Tuesday, adding that the Jewish state is equally determined, when timing allows, to press a military solution to expel the terrorist group from the Palestinian territories.Gaza is history, the official said glumly over Starbucks lattes and muffins in a downtown hotel suite prior to a whirlwind day of meetings with top Bush administration officials. Palestinian children in the West Bank soon will have textbooks in which they learn that the Gaza Strip is a piece of land that used to belong to the Palestinian Authority.
This gloomy assessment of the prospects for rolling back Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza, which accounts for 5 percent of the Palestinians' land but 40 percent of their population, comes less than a month before the Bush administration is to host a Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md., and as Israeli security officials cite an alarming increase in the smuggling of weapons and terrorists through porous Egyptian crossings into Gaza.
An Israeli Embassy official in Washington told FOX News the Egyptians three weeks ago allowed 85 Hamas terrorists and 30 affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all trained in Iran, to cross into Gaza and deploy in positions close to the Israeli border.
Testifying before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday, Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, detailed how Palestinian terrorists have smuggled more than 112 tons of explosives into Gaza since Israeli occupation forces withdrew from the strip in 2005, with 70 tons, or roughly 63 percent of the total, coming just since Hamas' coup in June.
Israeli officials estimate an additional 200 tons of explosives were already in Gaza, under the control of the Palestinian Authority, at the time Hamas seized control of the territory.